23 May 2018

1964 was the year that saw animation combined with live action in Disney’s Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson) and the release of the first Pink Panther short The Pink Phink (Friz Frelang/Hawley Pratt). In Japan, Mushi Pro tried to make more money from their budding Astro Boy franchise by editing together three episodes of the popular TV series into a feature film called Astro Boy: Hero of Space (鉄腕アトム 宇宙の勇者/ Tetsuwan Atom: Uchū no Yūsha, 1964). They jazzed things up for the cinematic release by adding colour to the sections of the film adapted from episodes 56 and 71. Rintarō (who was still using his real name, Shigeyuki Hayashi), Yoshitake Suzuki, and Eiichi Yamamoto are credited as directors.

The career of stop motion animation pioneer Tadahito “Tad” Mochinaga reached a pinnacle with the release of the Rankin/Bass TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Larry Roemer) (Learn more). While the story and character designs were all conceived of in the United States, Mochinaga’s MOM Productions made and animated the puppets. Since its debut on NBC on December 6, 1964, it has been televised annually becoming the longest continuously running Christmas TV special in the United States.

The independent animation scene was blossoming in Tokyo and the Animation Group of Three (アニメーション三人の会) expanded into an Animation Festival (アニメーション・フェスティバル) which ran from September 11-26 at the Sōgestu Cinematheque 11 (草月シネマテーク１１). From my research so far, the films that screened at the festival that year included:

Although she is not mentioned on the Japanese programme notes, the experimental film Dissent Illusion was co-directed by Mort’s wife Millie Goldsholl (1920-2012), who also wrote Faces and Fortunes. Millie ran the film division of the family’s Chicago-based design firm Morton Goldsholl Associates. Her animation Up is Down (1969) is a rare anti-war gem. Night on Bald Mountain was, of course, co-produced by his wife Claire Parker.

This was also a significant in the career of independent Japanese animator Fusako Yusaki (湯崎夫沙子, b. 1937). In 1964, she moved to Milan to study sculpture and found that clay animation was her métier. Her first films were made in the early 1970s and she is now considered one of the pioneers of stop motion animation in Italy.

22 May 2018

Nippon Connectionhas put together another wonderful programme of animation this year. One of the must-see feature films is Masaaki Yuasa’s Lu Over the Wall (夜明け告げるルーのうた, 2017), which won the coveted Cristal for Best Feature Film at Annecy last spring and went on to win the Noburō Ōfuji Award for innovation in animation at the Mainichi Film Awards earlier this year.

Equally worth watching is Yuasa’s adaptation of Tomihiko Morimi’s novel The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl (夜は短し歩けよ乙女, 2017). Morimi’s works are usually set in his native Kyoto, and this particular story shares not only the Kyoto setting but also many of its the characters with The Tatami Galaxy, another Morimi novel that Yuasa famously adapted into an acclaimed TV anime series. The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl is a critically acclaimed feature film that won Animation of the Year at the Japanese Academy Awards and Best Animated Feature at OIAF 2017.

Although we lost the wonderful Isao Takahata this year, the Studio Ghibli spirit lives on in Studio Ponoc, formed by former Ghibli producer Yoshiaki Nishimura in 2015. Its debut feature film, Mary and the Witch’s Flower (メアリと魔女の花) is directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, who also made his name at Ghibli. The visually stunning film was one of the top grossing Japanese films at the Japanese box office for 2017.

Mutafukaz (2017) is a French-Japanese co-production combining the forces of Ankama Animations (an offshoot of the publisher Ankama) with popular anime house Studio 4C. It is a wild, frenetic ride in the vein of Tekkon Kinkreet, which co-director Shōjirō Nishimi worked on as character designer. The film is the vision of the French co-director Guillaume “Run” Renard, who created the original graphic novel series. The film will be shown in French with German subtitles.

Popular anime director Mamoru Hosoda’s 2015 film The Boy and the Beast (バケモノの子) will play at the annual Film Breakfast – this event always sells out so book your seat early.

If your taste runs to more alternative fare, Ujicha is back at the festival with his cutout film Violence Voyager (2017). A graduate of Kyoto Saga Art University, Ujicha coined his primitive yet effective technique “gekimation” (劇メーション). He has made a number of shorts in this style and his debut feature film The Burning Buddha Man (2013) won an excellence award at the Japanese Media Arts Festival and was shown at Nippon Connection 2013. Watch the trailer for Violence Voyager to see if it’s up your alley.

Tokyo University of the Arts is back with a selection of its recent graduate works – read my full article on it here – and I have once again curated a selection of independent animated shorts. Learn more about it here. I am pleased to be able to announce that animation artist Yuki Hayashi will be able to attend the screening this year.

Director: Ujicha
Japan 2017, Blu-ray, 83 min, Japanese with English subtitles
European premiere

Thursday, May 31, 22:15 Naxoshalle Kino

PAINT YOUR OWN MUSIC:

COMPOSITION WORKSHOP FOR KIDS

Thursday, May 31, 15:00 Naxos Atelier

Workshop in Japanese with German translation

"Even if you can’t read notes and don’t play any instrument, you can be a composer - just by painting pictures! Yuichi MATSUMOTO of the Tokyo University of the Arts has invented a fantastic instrument, which conveys images into music. He, a composer himself, will show you how you can use your own drawings to make a short 'music-film'."

When I heard
that our animation guest at this year’s
Nippon Connection would be the composer and innovator Yuichi Matsumoto, I decided to make music the theme of this year’s independent animation selection.Music and animation have had a close
relationship since the earliest days of commercial animation.Many of the most innovative early animated
films from Japan were the record talkies
(レコードトーキー) of the late 1920s and 1930s – animated shorts designed to be played
simultaneously with a record (See:Belly
Drum Dance at Shojoji Temple, Song
of Spring, The Black
Cat, The
National Anthem: Kimigayo, The
Village Festival).

In Japan, the NHK (the national
public broadcaster) has supported many independent animators by hiring them to
do short pieces for their programming.The most prominent of these programmes is the long-running series Minna no Uta (Everyone’s Songs/みんなのうた) which has been pairing filmmakers (both live
action and animation) with music since 1961.Many early independent animators, like Taku Furukawa, Yōji Kuri, Sadao
Tsukioka, Shinji Fukushima and Fumio Ooi, made names for themselves animating
for Minna no Uta.

Today’s music video scene has provided a
great source of income for innovative animation artists and many of the films featured
here are recent music videos.I have
also selected recent animated shorts where I felt that music was integral to
the theme/s of the work.The first work
in the programme, Moving Colors, is a
group project featuring the work of 12 animation creators (aka Taku Team) with each team member representing
their favourite colour.The title design
is by Taku Furukawa (the Taku of the
Team name).The team consists of: Takuma Hashitani (orange), Waboku (aka Wataru Nakajima, brown), Hakhyun Kim (purple) Yoshiyuki Kaneko (black), Shiho Morita (red), Moe Koyano (raspberry/turquoise), Yū Tamura (green), Yasuaki
Honda (crimson), Yewon Kim
(mint), Tomoyoshi Joko (blue) and Hiroco Ichinose (gold).

Many thanks to Florian Höhr for his
help in putting together this programme.I am pleased to announce that animator
Yuki Hayashi has indicated that he
will attend the festival again this year.